


Please Come Around

by kitschique



Category: Batman: White Knight (Comics)
Genre: Gen, lost things not found
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-19
Updated: 2020-03-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:55:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23211346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitschique/pseuds/kitschique
Summary: In the aftermath of the Joker, Jason makes his choices.
Relationships: Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne, Talia al Ghul & Jason Todd
Comments: 2
Kudos: 52





	Please Come Around

**Author's Note:**

> from the dredges of my laptop

The first thing Jason thought when he got out was: _I can never go back._

It was funny, almost, because going back was all he had thought about for the entirety of the kidnapping. At first he had thought _I’ll escape_ and then he had thought _Batman will save me_ and then he had thought _Bruce will save me_ and then he had said, “Bruce Wayne,” out loud, gasped into the ear of Batman’s greatest enemy.

The Joker’s choice to release him had been no act of mercy. Jason knew himself too well now: a soft-stomached coward, a summer soldier in a cold city.

He had returned to Crime Alley, to try and become the boy who wished he had never met Bruce Wayne. Batman made no news, and Bruce Wayne vanished from public life. There was a small funeral, with Bruce and Alfred and Commissioner Gordon and Commissioner Gordon’s little redheaded daughter clinging to her father’s hand, and all of them staring solemnly at Jason’s empty grave. It reminded Jason of when he was a child, when he’d woken up cold on the mattress he and his mother had shared and found her dead to the touch. For every night after that until Bruce, Jason had been terrified of going to sleep and having nobody there to find him.

“Robin, like Robin Hood,” Jason had said, when Bruce asked. He’d always liked the idea of that bright hero, exacting a perfect justice on those who deserved it. Elevated from the grime of the streets, Jason had thought he could save the world.

In Crime Alley, he had laid on the streets and stared up at the smoggy sky, dressed in the tattered remains of the green Robin undershirt and a pair of old jeans he had dug out of a dumpster, thinking about his body that would never be found.

It was Talia who discovered him in that decomposing state. “Get up, Jason,” she had said, and Jason had turned away childishly.

“Get up!”

“Leave me alone,” he had whispered. “Can’t you see I just want to be left alone…”

“I won’t repeat myself again,” and she didn’t. Jason had loved Talia since he’d first met her, and had wanted her so badly to fill out the little family he had made in Bruce and Alfred. Back then, he couldn’t understand why she and Bruce couldn’t just be together when they loved each other too.

“Don’t take me back to Bruce, Talia,” he begged, later, and she looked into his eyes and saw what he had done, what she would never do; saw the betrayal of the father.

“Very well,” Talia said. “But I will not hide you. I will not bring you into the League. I will help you, when you need it, but do not need it, Jason. You will never see me again.”

It was a threat. She could have held a dagger to his throat and he would have nodded into the blade. “Just no Bruce,” he said, and drank his tea, and felt his eyes go heavy with the drug of sleep.

He came to wakefulness in a tiny apartment in a busy city. There was yelling outside of his window, and several credit cards in his wallet, and an ID that read _Jasón Azarola_ on it. It was such a bold name that it almost felt like a joke, but it was what Talia had chosen for him and so he would carry it for the rest of his life. Jason imagined the last dredges of Robin falling away, the grime of Gotham sloughing off, until he was clean as a newborn babe and all that was left of his former self was the traitor tongue lying behind his teeth.

It only occurred to him, after, that Talia had made his new name so obvious with the expectation that Bruce would search for him, and perhaps Bruce had. Perhaps Jason’s body was simply not meant to be found.


End file.
